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Topics in January

Jan 17, 2018

A Machine to Fight Hate

A campaign against hate and smears: Politicians, activists, and passersby came together on Berlin’s Gendarmenmarkt on September 5, 2017, to smash a wall made of expanded polystyrene foam bearing hate speech.

Researchers develop software to detect hate speech online.

Hate speech has become an everyday issue on the Internet. In social networks and the comments sections of many online media sites, discussions are increasingly being disrupted by posts insulting people for their origin, skin color, religion, sexuality, or gender.

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Elemental Insights

Dinosaurs have no secrets from isotope paleontologist Ulrich Struck – he analyzes how they lived, thousands of years after they went extinct.

Ulrich Struck has been appointed a professor at the Institute of Geological Sciences – for the unusual subject of isotope paleontology.

Prepared, fossilized, or preserved in alcohol, the evolutionary record presents itself with incredible variety and ingenuity – and Homo sapiens, the museum visitor, stares in amazement. Nowhere else in Berlin do the Earth’s present and past come into such direct contact as on the way to Ulrich Struck’s office.

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Where Should We Put Radioactive Waste?

The Konrad mine, a former iron ore mine in Salzgitter, is being prepared for its future use as a radioactive waste repository. Workers perform drilling and concrete work in the later control area in August 2017.

Unless all stakeholders across society are involved in the process, the search for a final repository simply goes nowhere. The ENTRIA research project based at Freie Universität has concluded after five years – with hopes for continuation.

Where are we supposed to put the 30,000 cubic meters of highly radioactive waste and 600,000 cubic meters of medium to low-level radioactive waste left by the Atomic Age? Although the days when nuclear fission will be used to generate energy in Germany are numbered, the issue of final storage will be a problem for a long time to come.

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